A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

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Tuesday, December 3, 2013

BEST OF BREED

The American Kennel Club is the official arbiter of dog
breeds and standards in the United States.Every year it holds a much heralded gathering at which breeders compete
for the title of Best of Breed or -- the highest possible award -- Best in
Show.Back in the late Sixties when I
was teaching at Columbia, I actually went to an AKC Dog Show and watched the
proceedings for a while.It was there that
I saw for the first time a magnificent Great Pyrenees.For those of you who do not know it, the
Great Pyrenees is a large splendid shaggy dog, looking like an unusually big
pure white Newfoundland.It is the sort
of dog that makes you want to throw your arms around its neck and hug it.There is a long list of officially recognized
breeds, each with precise standards of excellence maintained by the AKC.In the early stages of the competition,
Poodles compete against Poodles, Labrador Retrievers against Labrador Retrievers,
and English Bulldogs against English Bulldogs.On the last day, all the dogs judged Best in Breed compete against one
another.Now there really is no way to
compare a Miniature Poodle with a Great Dane, so essentially the judges are
asked to decide which dog comes closest to the ideal of perfection of its breed.You may like the Great Dane more than the Miniature
Poodle, but the Miniature Poodle may be a better Miniature Poodle than the Great
Dane is a Great Dane.I don'tmuch care for English Bulldogs, but I can see
how one might be declared Best in Show.

I thought of all this when my friend, Professor Goldfarb of
the Harvard Philosophy Department, chided me gently for describing Memorial
Hall as "ugly."He described
it as "the best example of Victorian Gothic architecture in the US."It is, in effect, Best of Breed.But I am afraid that to my ear, that is
rather like saying that a new book is "the best example of Hegelian metaphysics
by an American."

4 comments:

Intended or not, your analogy snarks at Warren (my old high school buddy) more than you intended. For the "precise standards of excellence maintained by the AKC", may be precise and may be standards and may be maintained. What they aren't is "of excellence". In fact they have ruined many breeds--German Shepherds being one I know about. Deciding that the proper "conformation" of a GSD is the downward sloping back (leading to joint disease and other disabilities) means that anyone who wants a healthy GSD needs to stay away from American breeding stocks. And people who need actual working dogs, rather than show dogs, know this. (The analogy doesn't seem to hold for "ugly" architectural styles; after all Memorial Hall is still standing. ) And all that reminds me that y'all should buy my wife's book (not a non sequitur):http://amzn.to/18g9pIK

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.